From a small hill, there is a good view of the Oranjekom pond. In spite of the cold weather, most of it is not frozen, attracting many birds. There are maybe 100 tufted ducks. Scores of mallards. Coots. Little grebes. Also some female pochards. There are also gadwalls, and common teal. Great cormorants. A grey heron on the bank.

Join us in protest this coming Saturday, 3.1.2009, in Tel Aviv. Together we will call out:

Stop the Killing! No to the Siege! Yes to life for both peoples!

In these dark days, let us stick to our message:

Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies!

Our demand: A full truce and the lifting of the siege on Gaza NOW!

We meet at the corner of Frishman St. and Khen Boulevard at 18:30

* Information about transportation from across the country will be published shortly.

Please note: For the past week mass arrests have been carried out amongst Palestinian citizens of Israel who are exercising their democratic right to protest. On Saturday, at 13:00, before the Tel Aviv demonstration, a mass protest rally will be held in Sakhnin by the High Committee of Arab Israelis against the killing in Gaza. Please make an effort to join – your presence is of the essence!

In the conservative army that propelled the Republican Party to a generation’s dominance of US politics, Paul Weyrich was among the fiercest warriors. Others might do deals with the Democratic foe if they helped advance the cause. Not Weyrich. For him, compromise was a betrayal of core principles, a step back rather than a step forward. …

His conservatism above all was cultural. Weyrich in 1979 coined the phrase “moral majority” which, with the televangelist Jerry Falwell, he turned into a movement that became one of the most potent strands of the Republican Party. His signature issues were not so much big government and the Communist threat (though both greatly alarmed him) as abortion, feminism (“feminazis” he dubbed such activists) and homosexuality – all, in his view, acute dangers to the traditional values that had been the making of America.

Such was his influence, especially in the decades before and after Ronald Reagan took power in 1980, that many ranked him among the four main architects of that Republican golden age, along with Barry Goldwater, William Buckley Jr, and of course Reagan himself.

Unlike them, Weyrich lived long enough to witness the conservative cause sink to its lowest ebb in 40 years.